Check out Spokeo.com

I previously wrote about Yoname.com which is a social networking aggregator, or a site that searches multiple social networking sites. Another good site to try is Spokeo.com. If you have an email address for someone you'd like to check out, enter it into Spokeo and Spokeo quickly and easily grabs content from across the web. It returns other social networking sites where the individual is registered.

A successful search depends on the tools you're using. I have found that no one tool is perfect and that the most successful searches involve multiple search tools.

Yesterday I joined Emailfinder.com which cost $1.95 per month for a membership (charged one year at a time). In most cases the email addresses returned were old, out-of-date and not useful. It did however, return information on a case I have been working on.

I had an email address that I had picked up along the search path but couldn't verify it belonged to the subject. I ran it through all my sources, but it just didn't connect to known activity for the individual. But when I ran it through Emailfinder.com it connected to a social networking site I didn't know about (and lots of photos of the subject). It also connected to her Twitter account, which I was aware of, but couldn't verify I had the right email address. Once it linked through Emailfinder.com to her Twitter account I knew that I had the right email address.

With every piece of verified information your search can expand. There are often nuggets of information on social networking sites (like friends and photos) that can lead to even more information about the subject.

It's also kind of interesting how I came up with the email address to begin with. I Googled the subject's name and explored all the links that came up. A couple of the links led me to other links and eventually to a website www.[her-name].com. But when I went to the website all that was there was a "parked" site with no information. I looked the domain name up through Whois.com and found that it was privately registered so I could not see who owned it.

Next I visited Archive.org and plugged the domain name into the Wayback Machine. The Wayback Machine archives websites periodically so you can "travel back" and see what they looked like previously. This site was archived in 2007 and when I clicked to view the archive it loaded a site full of images. The images were no longer available so the site looked like a grouping of empty boxes with no text at all. Seemed useless. But, I started clicking on different sections of the site and low and behold, one click brought up a link to the email address that appeared when it opened in my mail program.

Searching takes time. I usually spend a good 3-4 hours just getting started, but it's amazing what a good search can find. I'm not always successful, if the person doesn't have much web presence then I'm just not going to find anything, but usually there's something out there to be found. And even if it's not incriminating in anyway, information can be a powerful thing.